Mary Mapes, producer of the primetime news program 60 Minutes Wednesday, her crew, and CBS national news anchor Dan Rather face accuracy questions following the airing, in the months before the US 2004 presidential election, of a report that President George W. Bush, then seeking re-election, had in the early 1970s received preferential treatment from officials of the Texas Air National Guard. The allegation included concealing Bush’s failure to meet even minimal training and performance requirements, and his absence from the Air Guard for most of 1972 following a transfer to the Alabama Air National Guard.

The core documents on which these allegations were based were immediately called into question by a variety of sources. The controversy about the documents being forgeries first appeared on a blog, which was then investigated and amplified by various talk radio hosts, bloggers and numerous mainstream media sources, including The Washington Post and CBS itself. They found that certain characteristics of the memos, such as its font and letter spacing, indicated the memos were created on a computer using Microsoft Word, and therefore could not have been typed on a typewriter in the early 1970s.[5] Subsequently, the person who produced the documents admitted that he had lied about where he had obtained them.[6]